King: Media sensationalism loses sight of real problems

Bill King says the 24-hour TV news cycle and the Internet's voracious appetite for catastrophe means we must all learn to be more skeptical.

By Bill King

Updated
7:13 pm CDT, Wednesday, September 10, 2014

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We now live in a day where the media's competition for the public attention and the pressure to fill the 24-hour news cycle demand that we be bombarded incessantly by the catastrophe du jour.

In recent weeks, it has been the Ebola outbreak in western Africa. It is almost impossible to pick up a paper or tune in a news channel that is not trumpeting the danger from the virus. Various commentators have speculated about the spread of the disease to this country. Yet, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that Ebola "does not pose a significant risk to the United States."

So far, about 2,000 people have died from the current outbreak. While that is certainly tragic, it is about the same number that died from malaria yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, going back for years. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that 627,000 people, mostly children, die from malaria each year. A decade ago, over a million people each year were dying from malaria. How many stories have you seen from any media outlet about the actual ongoing calamity of malaria?

And it is not just Ebola. We obsess over terrorism. I cannot even imagine how many times the word "terrorist" is used in print and electronic media. Yet according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, about 15,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks last year worldwide, including only a handful of Americans. The Economist magazine has calculated the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack as four times less likely than being struck by lightning. And yet a recent Gallup poll found that 36 percent of Americans are worried that they or their family members could be victims of a terrorist attack. And little wonder, given the nonstop coverage of the issue.

The number of people who are killed in terrorist attacks pales in comparison to many more common dangers.

For example, 1.2 million are killed and another 50 million seriously injured in car accidents worldwide. How many stories have you seen from any media outlet about the actual ongoing calamity of automobile accident deaths?

To some degree, I suppose it is in line with the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt.

We have known for years that malaria kills in the millions. And who has not been touched by the tragedy of an automobile accident? Humans seem to have a built-in defense mechanism that dulls our fear of the familiar even if it is, nonetheless, lethal.

But it is also the competition for the audience that has set off a word inflation that has made nearly everything a catastrophe. Google has a fascinating tool called the Ngram Viewer that will search all of the books it has scanned into Google Books. After you type in any word, the program will tell you the frequency with which that word has appeared in its library of books over time.

So, for example, if you search for "catastrophic," you will find that word appears about twice as often in books published in 2000 (the latest date available on the system) as in 1950. "Apocalyptic" is used three times more. The use of "disaster" is up about 50 percent, and so on. I suspect that if such a tool were available for years after 2000 and for news reports, especially those emanating from the 24-hour television news networks, the increases in the use of catastrophic terms would be far greater.

And, of course, the unedited, unfiltered Internet is even worse on this score. I got an email this morning "proving" that drinking milk is more dangerous than smoking. Right.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any respite from the over-hyping of disastrous or near-disastrous events in the foreseeable future, which means that each of us is going to have to be more on guard to be ever more skeptical of what we hear and see reported.